Get Noticed
Reviews
A Critical View About Advertising on Social Media and the Need for User Code of Ethics
Feb 27th
Generally speaking, I’m very against a lot of promotions and advertisements that happen on social media. That’s not because I despise advertising, but more because a lot of ads on social media are actually disguised as user generate content. Things got so ugly that the FTC had to step in and impose regulations on how to advertise on social media. Recently, there was a class action filed against Yelp for extortion, where the company is accused of asking for money in exchange of good reviews. How did things get there and should we get rid of marketers?
Advertising is unavoidable in a free market
The great thing about capitalism is that all have the freedom to choose a trade out of their own decision. There is no government that will impose it’s view on how the economy should be run. Rather, it is an ‘invisible hand’ that dictates or at least suggests picking one trade over another. Basically, when one has to take its own competences as well as that of its surrounding when deciding upon the trade to choose. For example, someone who is good at repairing cars must also see if there are other mechanics in the area where he wants to open his business.
Here, free market must have a mechanism in which suppliers can promote their products or services in a way with which consumers will be able to decide between a few competing suppliers. In other words, every business has to be allowed to communicate whatever it is offering to the market, but also, every consumer accepts to invest some of its time to take knowledge of the different offers available on the market. Without this implicit agreement, free market wouldn’t exist meaning that there won’t be any competition and that things will end up in monopolies.
Advertising needs space to communicate its messages
We live in a physical world. Therefore, even things that seem abstract like communication needs a medium to travel. One very simple way of communicating is through sound. If I shout loud enough, then every body on the planet will hear me! I wish I could do that…
But there are other ways of communicating. For instance, posters are used a lot everywhere to communicate messages to people. In a similar way, the Internet is also a medium to communicate. Of course, it seems abstract because everything is bits of information, but if you think of a wall of information where your favorite news or email is displayed, then it is easy to see that that little space that is used for advertising is taking a piece of physical space. My point is that this is the second pillar of marketing, meaning that it needs to have access to all the space that it can use to communicate its messages.
Social media is a damn good space to advertise
Since social media has attracted a great amount of attention lately, it is only natural that marketers throw themselves at the platform. The same why big displays on the highway are used by marketers to advertise their products, a few pixels on a web page can also be used to advertise. But there is something about social media that is different from traditional platforms for promotion: it is new. Since it is new, people don’t deal with it the same they do with other platform. When we see a ad on a poster, we know it’s an ad because we have been trained for it.
The new thing with social media is in the agreement that all users have to exchange with complete strangers. We have tons of Twitter friends and followers and we are friends with Facebook people that we have met on Mafia Wars. So somewhere, we have all agreed to have a place where we could exchange with people we do not know of, something that we don’t do in real life. Now the problem is that having people to cooperate on an open platform doesn’t guarantee that malicious agents will not infect it.
Imperfect information and market failures in social media
The problem with marketing on social media is that consumers and suppliers are in a game of imperfect information. When a suppliers pays someone to write positive feedback about a product, there is practically no way for the consumer to find out who is behind the good review. Of course, consumers could check the reviewer’s history and try to estimate to what degree it can be trusted. But then, people have to spend a lot of time figuring out who is trustable or not. Even worse, there is no guarantee that someone who has been a reputable source of reviews has integrity in the future.
It is precisely this reality of social media that malicious agents exploit in there advantage. This is where the market fails to deliver value or that value is not delivered in an optimal way when dealing with advertising through social media. The problem is that people will take bad decisions because they will be deceived by user generate content that is not really content but only advertising. Trying to avoid deception at all costs could lead to pathological situations where consumers will have to spend an undefined amount of time screening reviews to make sure of their legitimacy before taking a decision. Since there is no guarantee that the consumer will get anywhere by screening he might become victim of paralysis by analysis and not be able to take a decision.
Advertising on social media must be regulated
Knowing that markets can fail, there could be an attempt to regulate supplier behavior on social media. FTC’s attempt to fine bloggers who don’t disclose payments is one of them and it could be a safe bet to say that more regulations are to be expected in the future. These regulations will impose that advertisement must be clearly marked and differentiated from real content. What it means in terms of the agreement between consumers and suppliers that I describes earlier, is that consumers are willing to have a piece of that physical space reserved for advertising. For example, people are willing to have the right sidebar on Facebook be reserved for advertising. Of course, this is going to take space that will not be used by Facebook to display otherwise useful content. That not-displayed-and-useful content will have to be places somewhere else on another page and accessing that page will mean that the consumer will have to perform a click.
Consumer lassitude and the failure of regulations
It might seems to be little effort in exchange of living in a free market, but it is still effort that means a bigger server for Facebook, and a whole lot of clicks if we add up all those clicks by the 300 million members. As a result, there is a general lassitude among consumers in regards of advertising. It is as if all consumers know that they have to deal with advertising for free market to function, but that at the same time they are fed up with being exposed to it.
It is because of this feeling that people disregard publicity and it is the same reason that pushes marketers to use tricks to avoid the defense mechanism that all consumers have developed against advertising. In other words, regulations will not regulate supplier behavior but only force them to combine secretly with malicious agents. Now the challenge for legislators and law enforcement is to prove the existence of secret combination between a product supplier and a social media reviewer. History shows that this is a very difficult task that succeeds only under a few strict conditions.
Consumers must be aware of the different forms of advertising
Since regulations will not stop businesses to use fake reviews to promote their things, consumers must learn to use social media in a way that would detect fake reviews. To take an example from day to day life, fake reviews would be like walking in the street and having someone come up and say: “Pepsi’s so good for the stomach, I tried it and its great. You should do the same”. How do we know that this person is working for Pepsi? Simply because it doesn’t make any sense for a sane person to go out there and say such a thing to someone he doesn’t know. Therefore, our reflex is to thing that the person is crazy and that the message that he is communicating should be disregarded. Marketers are very aware of this fact and that’s why they don’t invest in such techniques!
Now my point is that the should be common understandings among social media users about what is the ethical way of interacting to each other. The same way that there are norm in society about not going to a stranger and talk about Pepsi, there should be norms of ethics for proper behavior on social media. My point is that consumers must adapt their attitude and behavior to a new media for communication if they want to take full advantage of the benefits the it offers.
The Economics of ‘Mass Tweeting’ And ‘Mass Following’
Feb 15th
I have briefly discussed the concept of mass tweeting as a tactics used for garbing attention to the mass tweeter’s account with the hope of transforming some of those who are followed into followers. I have stated that mass tweets can only lead into attracting one kind of Twitter users, that is ‘mass followers’. This is a normal phenomenon since mass following requires searching for certain keywords, which means that those who tweet a lot have more chances of being found in search queries and eventually followed by mass followers.
What I will question in the current post is the common belief that such tactics are futile. Indeed, many would argue that mass tweeting is bad strategy for marketing since it attracts the wrong kind of crowd. I would argue the opposite. I think mass followers and mass tweeters are the right kind of crowd to be in touch with, especially for those who are into social media marketing. I will try to explain why it is so.
Mass tweeting will not only attract mass followers
First, we have to understand that mass tweeting will not only attract mass followers. There will always be a small amount of ‘curious’ Twitter users that will follow a mass tweeter simply because of the fact that there are tons of people who listen to Twitter streams and that most of them are ‘followers’ who don’t tweet that much. These curious users are valuable because they have the potential to blossom into qualified leads, meaning that if they are exposed to the right message, they will be interested in the product or service that is promoted. Since the proportion of these curious users will be small compared to mass followers, it will be hard to justify the investment of all that effort in gaining only a few potential qualified leads.
Mass followers can be profitable too
However, a closer examination of mass followers will show that they are also valuable to a certain degree. Mass followers might not become qualified leads, but they know that most of their followers will not be qualified leads either because they have been acquired through either mass tweeting or mass following. Therefore, the mass follower has to adopt a more rational relationship with most of his friends and followers. He will have to enter into a ‘retweeting association’ with his followers meaning that they retweet each other in other to profit from each other’s ‘curious followers’ that they have each amassed through mass tweeting and mass following!
Now, this is going to create serious traffic to a promoted product or service only if there are enough marketers connected to each other and constantly retweeting each other. This implies that they all use some king of automatic retweeting application that saves them from having to be retweeting 24/7.
The effects of automated tools on Twitter user experience
Who says automatic application means spam. My view is that while this is close to black hat social media optimization, it is not so bad since the marketing/SMO community seems to be very small compared to the whole Twitter network of 25 million users. In other words, these automatic retweeting software will only not seriously affect Twitter’s quality of service or user experience because spam will be filtered out by the ‘curious users’ who happen to be part of the SMO clique. However, these software will insure the majority of marketers that there message will reach a critical amount of curious users, hoping that they create the proper word-of-mouth.
SMO More Important Than SEO?
Nov 4th
Social media optimization is no longer support for SEO; it is now recognized as a marketing technique apart. With almost as much people using Facebook than Google, social media becomes indeed an important tool in the hands of marketers. However, to reach its full potential, social media needs to be used in a different way than search engines.
SEO is inherently static: once a page is optimized, searched and read, there is nothing else left to gain for the marketer. On the other hand, social media is dynamic tool, i.e. marketer and customers are in ongoing and interactive contact. By integrating social media in marketing strategy, managers can do more than create a Facebook page and support brand awareness.
By using Facebook or Twitter to converse with their customers, firms will profit from the viral nature of social media. Engaging the right people on social media will therefore result of spreading dialogue that marketers have initiated. For example, if someone likes a video advertising about your product, he or she could post the video on his Facebook wall. This will have a viral effect as that person’s friends might do the same or comment about the video. Even if it is less obvious, the same principle holds for other kind of dialogues. Of course, things will not happen in the same way than for video advertising, but there will be a form of word out effect about your product or company.
The great thing about social media is that a lot of things can be measured from messages that are exchanged on the platform. This is because traces are left every time something is said on the platform, especially for ones that are broadcast-based like Twitter. I think that social media optimization is only in a stage of infancy and that great tools and techniques are to be developed to maximize ROI.
Google Places Page is no Exception: Competition is Always Good News for Consumers
Sep 26th
I am very interest by the concept of network externalities as well as the lockin (or bandwagon effect) phenomenon. Every time, I see a market leader be forced to bring change and innovate in the face of competition, I cannot do anything else than be amazed by the accuracy of these concepts. After all, big players do not need to innovate just to please there customers, it is always the market situation (hence network externalities) that force them to do so.
Lately, I came across Google new thing: Google Places. Well this is not really a new thing. First, info about a place was available from Google Map even before. Also, Bing and Yahoo had something similar already, so we can’t say that it’s Google’s invention.
Now, to explain the parallel with the network externalities theory, I’ll go with a simple question that came to my mind: why this good feature wasn’t available before? I call this a good feature because when it come to map-based local search, it is extremely difficult to deliver complete and thorough information about a place on the same page as the map. In fact current standards suggest that grids or lists are the most usable and convenient ways of providing information. Having information cohabit with map is indeed a real challenge, one that could require such drastic change in usability principles that it could be unusable because too new. The dedicated place page is thus a must and unavoidable feature of map-based local search if one wants to reach for more usability.
My opinion is that Bing’s local search threat forced Google to go faster in delivering this feature. Many analysts argue that local search is the (or one of the) big things to come (or already there). With the spectacular gains that Bing has made on the search engine market, Google must respond by having cutting edge technology that is a necessity of the day.
Now what’s the result of all this for the consumer: better search results and more usable solutions. This is so because the big players are forced to compete with each other and that none of them has a big advantage over the other. Also, with the fast pace with which technology is evolving combined with the widespread adoption of the Internet, things could get ugly fast if one stays behind. Indeed, it could very well mean death.